Some might say it is not appropriate to run for governor without first holding a series of less demanding public offices. This argument holds that one should "work your way up the ladder" before becoming governor.

This view is understandable. However, history and current events show that political leaders who take this route become so captured by the status quo, and so indebted to their base and those who helped them on their way up, that they lose the willingness and ability to think objectively and creatively. They tend to become unwilling, perhaps unable, to grow intellectually to solve or even accurately understand and communicate public problems. They become handicapped by their adherence to narrow and unexamined ideologies.

Furthermore, such politicians, either consciously or otherwise, are always planning their next step up the ladder. This limits their ability to be effective leaders as they become more and more concerned with their image and career and less and less concerned with the public they supposedly serve.
Just as a business or athletic team failing to approach its potential often hires an outsider to chart a new course so too our struggling democracy must look to those who are not political insiders for a fresh approach. For too long America has relied on career politicians, attorneys, celebrities and other members and representatives of the elite to lead our nation. This approach has not worked. Public problems that concerned citizens would have addressed years ago (e.g. the health care and energy crises, global climate change, growing economic inequity, etc.) remain unsolved and, for all practical purposes, ignored by insider politicians.

It is time for a new approach to electing political leaders. As Aristotle rightly observed some 2,300 years ago, "The basis of the democratic state is liberty ... One principle of liberty is for all to rule and be ruled in turns." We can not become a true democracy or a nation of liberty if we continue to rely on the usual suspects to head state and national governments. There is a role for political insiders and career public servants in government. However, farmers, teachers, small businessmen and women, social service and blue collar workers, writers, philosophers and people from all walks of life must also take turns as leaders of government. In a truly democratic society the words, "the government" would be interchangeable with the words, "the people." But the only way for this to happen is "for all to rule and be ruled in turns."

With few exceptions an aristocracy of political insiders and the well connected have ruled our state and nation for decades. Nearly all, in a variety of ways, have failed the vast majority of citizens. They have moved our nation ever farther from the possibility of creating a humane, forward looking and truly democratic society.

America leads the world in locking up human beings as the answer to underlying social, political, economic and moral problem. We spend more than the rest of the world combined preparing for and engaging in military violence. We lead the industrialized world in the ever growing gulf between the economic elite and the general citizen. We are the only industrialized nation in the world that does not have a national health care program, the only nation that places the profits of the medical-industrial complex before the well-being of its citizens. These realities suggest that our nation is failing to live up to its potential and that it is time for a new path.

America's founders rebelled against an aristocracy based on family connections. They would now rebel against an aristocracy based on great wealth and insider politics. The vision of America's founders was of citizen politicians, not career politicians. I am running for governor to help bring that wise and noble vision to fruition.